Spain is reeling under the deep delusion, Germany is beginning to feel the pain, and the UK is on the verge of deep economic wounds that could leave painful scars for generations.

A few days ago Kurt Bock, the firm’s [BASF’s] chief executive, warned that its Ludwigshafen plant may soon be forced to close, with BASF’s German jobs relocated elsewhere. The reason, he said, was Germany’s soaring energy costs and the crippling green levies being used to pay for ‘renewables’ such as wind farms. With German energy prices already twice as high as in the United States and likely to rise much further, the time had come to reconsider ‘the competitiveness of the location’.

… For voters, this [the UK’s new green energy policies] will mean years of further cost-of-living misery. But for business, it may well lead to German-style bankruptcy. About two thirds of this legally mandated ‘dash for wind’ will be paid for by companies. Some will find it intolerable, and join previous casualties of Britain’s green revolution such as aluminium smelting. Those that remain will have little choice but to pass their bills on to customers — so many other things will become more expensive, too._Spectator __ via GWPF

The industrial jobs that are at risk represent an appreciable part of the UK’s and Germany’s economy. Once they are gone, they are not coming back.

Many energy illiterates in government, the energy media, and academia, believe that big wind and big solar represent “free energy.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only are subsidy costs for big wind and solar “through the roof,” but the hidden costs of throwing unreliable intermittent energy willy-nilly onto a delicate power grid, are incalculably large over time.

Energy markets are riddled with government intrusions, from mandates and grants of monopoly privilege to special tax breaks and environmental and land use regulations. All energy sources are both subsidized and penalized. The point to remember is that when given comparative estimates regarding energy subsidies alone, we are being told an incomplete story.

From the perspective of economics—and the free society—the important question is how are coercive policies distorting supply and demand relative to a free market that reflects actual scarcities, production costs, and consumer preferences? _MasterResource

Of course, we expect governments and bureaucracies to behave stupidly. But when for-profit corporations such as Google, Facebook, Walmart, Microsoft, and scores of other large employers make bad investments on unreliable, intermittent, exorbitantly expensive green energy, how do we explain the malfeasance? Who will tell the stockholders, and explain what is being done to their investment?

Here is the root of the deep delusion: The belief that man-made carbon dioxide exhausts are leading up to a catastrophic climate doom — an apocalypse of epochal proportions. But is this belief rational, is it worth destroying entire economies?

Here is important information that should shine light on the topic, from a recently published research paper in “Climate of the Past”:

A new paper published in Climate of the Past finds that CO2 levels lagged temperature changes in East Antarctic ice cores by 500-1500 years during the warming at the onset of the last interglacial, and lagged temperatures by 5,000 years after the start of glaciation at end of the last interglacial [~120,000 years ago].

Despite Al Gore’s attempt to obscure this inconvenient truth, temperatures lead CO2 levels on long, intermediate, and short-term timescales, on both the upside and the downside. CO2 cannot be the ‘control knob’ or ‘amplifier’ of climate, because the tail does not wag the dog, the cause does not follow the effect, and the globe starts to warm and cool 500-5000 years in advance of CO2 changes.

If CO2 follows temperatures rather than the other way around — as would make sense from the basic physics of dissolved CO2 in seawater — the rationale underlying contemporary green climate and energy policies is a massive delusion, fit only for foolish ideologues, brain dead drones, and anti-capitalist radicals.

Governments and corporations of the world are leaping headlong into a risky gamble, based upon something that appears to be a deep delusion. They are risking the futures and livelihoods of citizens, stockholders, employees, and innocent bystanders on ideas that they are not equipped to explain or understand in any significant way.

If not for the accidental shale revolution in the US — occurring despite Obama’s anti-energy inclinations — the US would be falling into the same pickle barrel as the rest. Canada and Australia are likewise skating through the disaster despite the green stupidity of so many of their politicians.

Keep your eyes open for opportunity. And never forget to be a skeptic, because everything you think you know, just ain’t so.